இஸ்லாமிய சமூகங்களில் இன்னுமா அடிமை முறை இருக்கிறது?

இவர்கள்தான் இந்துக்கள், இந்தியாவை எல்லாம் நாள் தவறாமல் மேடை போட்டுத் தமிழ் நாட்டில் ஏசிக் கொண்டிருக்கிறார்கள் . தீண்டாமையை தாம்தான் ஒழிக்கப் போவதாக மார் தட்டும் இந்தப் புரட்டல் முஸ்லிம் அரசியல்வாதிகளுக்கு உலகில் பல இஸ்லாமிய நாடுகளிலும் இன்னும் அடிமை முறை இருப்பது தெரியாது போலிருக்கிறது. அவர்கள் தம் மூக்கைத் தாண்டி எதையும் பார்ப்பதில்லை, பாலஸ்தீனம்,காஷ்மீரம் இரண்டும் மட்டும் தினம் காலை ஒரு முறை கோசம் போட உதவும். என்ன சன்மங்களோ!
ராபர்ட் ஸ்பென்சரோ கிருஸ்தவர்களை மட்டும் அடிமைகளை வைத்திருந்தீர்கள் என்று திட்டுகிறீர்களே, ரோசம் இருந்தா அவங்கிளியும் போய்த் திட்டுங்கடா பாப்பம்னு ஒரு சவால் விட்றாரு. ஏய்யா, சும்மா இருந்தாலியே தலையை வெட்டுறன்னு சொல்றாங்கன்னு ஜெயமோகனே சொல்றாரு. எந்தலை எங்கிட்டியே இருக்கணும்னு நா பாட்டில் போய்க்கிட்டே இருக்கிறன். என்னை வந்து இந்த வம்புல மாட்டி விடுறியே என்ன் கொழுப்பான்னு அவரைக் கேட்கலாம்னா அவரு எங்கெ இருக்காருன்னுட்டுத் தெரியல்லியெ.
கீழே அந்த ஆளு எழுதினதில் இஸ்லாம் பத்தி எழுதினத மட்டும்தான் எடுத்து வுட்டேன். இவரு சொல்றதெல்லாம் நெசமாவா இருக்குங்கிறீங்க?

ஆனாக்க அவர் என்ன சொல்றாருன்னு பார்த்தா, இஸ்லாமில முஸ்லிம் அல்லாதவர்களெல்லாம் படைக்கப்பட்டதிலியே மோசமானவங்கன்னு சொல்லி இருக்கு, அதுனாலதான் அனேக அடிமைகளும் ஜிஹாத் போரில் பிடிபட்டவங்களா இருக்காங்கன்னு சொல்றாரு. அதுல பாருங்க இந்துக்களும் அடிமைகளா இருந்திருக்காங்கன்னுட்டு சொல்றாரு.
முஸ்லிம் அல்லாதவங்களை இப்பிடி அடிமையாப் பிடிச்சு வித்துக் காசு பண்ணாங்களே அந்த எண்ணிக்கை எத்தினி? 17 மிலியன் பேர் இருக்கும்னுட்டு சொல்றாரு. அதாவது கிட்டத்தட்ட ஒரு கோடியே 70 லட்சம் பேரை அடிமையாப் பிடிச்சு வித்தாங்களாம். என்ன ஒரு அருமையான ஆட்கள் இவங்க? இன்னிக்கு இந்தியாவில் இருக்கிற எல்லாரையும் விடுதலை செய்யப் போறாங்களாமில்லே?
இவிங்களெ நம்பலாமா?
இதிலெ பாருங்க இன்னிக்கும் பல முஸ்லிம் நாடுங்கள்ளெ அடிமை முறை இருக்குன்னிட்டு இவரு சொல்றாரு. நாம என்ன போய்ப் பாக்கப் போறோமா? இருந்தாலும் புகை இருக்கு, நெருப்பு இருக்குமான்னிட்டு யோசிங்க.
அவரு சொல்ற நாடுகள்லெ சவுதியிலே அடிமை முறையை சட்டத்தில் ஒழிச்சது 1960இல. யேமன், ஓமான் நாடுகள்லெ 1970லதான் அடிமை முறைய ஒழிச்சாங்களாம். நைஜர்ங்கிற நாட்டில் 2004 இலதான் ஒழிச்சாங்களாம். மாரிடானியாங்கற நாட்டில் இன்னும் இருக்காமில்ல. சூடான்ல இன்னும் அடிமைகளைப் பிடிக்கறத்துக்குப் போர் நடத்துற வழக்கம் அரபி முஸ்லிம்கள் கிட்ட இருக்குன்னுட்டு சொல்றாரு. 2007 இல கூட இப்பிடி சிறை வைச்சு அடிமையாக்கி இருக்காங்களாம்.
இதில பாருங்க சவுதிக்காரங்க ஏதோ தாங்கதான் இஸ்லாத்தோட கார்டியனுன்னிட்டு தெனம் சவுண்டு வுடறாங்க. சூடான் காரங்களோ தங்களுக்குத்தான் இஸ்லாம்ங்கிறத்துல எது நெசமான இஸ்லாம்னு தெரியும்னுட்டு தெனம் தப்பு அடிக்கிறாங்க.
மக்கா, ஏம்லெ இப்பிடி ஊரை எத்துறீங்கன்னுட்டு ஒரு சவுண்டு வுடலாம்னு வருது. ஆனா, நமக்கெதுக்கு வம்பு. இத்தினி பெருந்தலை எல்லாம் இவுங்க உட்ற கதை எல்லாம் நம்பிக்கிட்டுப் போய் கஞ்சி குட்சி, குல்லால்லாம் போட்டு சலாம் போட்டுட்டு வர்றாங்க. நாம என்ன ஏதோ ஓரமாக் கெடக்கோம். நமக்கெதுக்கு வம்பு, இல்லெ?

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Slavery, Christianity, and Islam

By Robert Spencer
Monday, February 4, 2008, 7:45 AM
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Islamic Slavery

In the Islamic world, however, the situation is very different. The Muslim prophet Muhammad owned slaves, and like the Bible, the Qur’an takes the existence of slavery for granted, even as it enjoins the freeing of slaves under certain circumstances, such as the breaking of an oath: “Allah will not call you to account for what is futile in your oaths, but He will call you to account for your deliberate oaths: for expiation, feed ten indigent persons, on a scale of the average for the food of your families; or clothe them; or give a slave his freedom” (5:89). Jihad theorist Sayyid Qutb adduces this as evidence that in Islam “there is no difference between a prince and a pauper, a seigneur and a slave.” Nevertheless, while the freeing of a slave or two here and there is encouraged, the institution itself is never questioned. The Qur’an even gives a man permission to have sexual relations with his slave girls as well as with his wives: “The believers must (eventually) win through, those who humble themselves in their prayers; who avoid vain talk; who are active in deeds of charity; who abstain from sex, except with those joined to them in the marriage bond, or (the captives) whom their right hands possess, for (in their case) they are free from blame” (23:1-6). A Muslim is not to have sexual relations with a woman who is married to someone else—except a slave girl: “And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess. It is a decree of Allah for you” (4:24).

Why should such passages be any more troubling to anyone than passages in the Bible such as Exodus 21:7–11, which gives regulations for selling one’s daughter as a slave? Because in Islam there is no equivalent of the Golden Rule, as articulated by Jesus: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matt. 7:12). The closest Islamic tradition comes to this is one hadith in which Muhammad says, “None of you will have faith till he likes for his (Muslim) brother what he likes for himself.” The parenthetical “Muslim” in that sentence was added by the Saudi translator, and does not appear in the original Arabic; however, “brother” is generally not used in Islamic tradition to refer to anyone but fellow Muslims. Also mitigating against a universal interpretation of this maxim is the sharp distinction between believers and unbelievers that runs through all of Islam. The Qur’an says that the followers of Muhammad are “ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another” (48:29), and that the unbelievers are the “worst of created beings” (98:6). One may exercise the Golden Rule in relation to a fellow Muslim, but according to the worldview presented by such verses and others like them, the same courtesy is not properly to be extended to unbelievers.

That is one principal reason why the primary source of slaves in the Islamic world has been non-Muslims, whether Jews, Christians, Hindus or pagans. Most slaves in Islam were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare. The pioneering scholar of the treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic societies, Bat Ye’or, explains the system that developed out of jihad conquest:

The jihad slave system included contingents of both sexes delivered annually in conformity with the treaties of submission by sovereigns who were tributaries of the caliph. When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya [tax on non-Muslims]. From 652 until its conquest in 1276, Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana, Sijistan, Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [House of War, i.e., non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants.

Historian Speros Vryonis observes that “since the beginning of the Arab razzias [raids] into the land of Rum [the Byzantine Empire], human booty had come to constitute a very important portion of the spoils.” The Turks, as they steadily conquered more and more of Anatolia, reduced many of the Greeks and other non-Muslims there to slave status: “They enslaved men, women, and children from all major urban centers and from the countryside where the populations were defenseless.” The Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever jihadists conquered a territory, “there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain and populace of the place.” When Muslim armies invaded India, “its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country.”

Slaves faced pressure to convert to Islam. Patricia Crone, in an analysis of Islamic political theories, notes that after a jihad battle was concluded, “male captives might be killed or enslaved…Dispersed in Muslim households, slaves almost always converted, encouraged or pressurized by their masters, driven by a need to bond with others, or slowly, becoming accustomed to seeing things through Muslim eyes even if they tried to resist.” Thomas Pellow, an Englishman who was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716, was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to “burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner.”

Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history, as it was, of course, in the West as well up until relatively recent times. Yet while the European and American slave trade get lavish attention from historians (as well as from mau-mauing reparations advocates and their marks, guilt-ridden contemporary politicians), the Islamic slave trade actually lasted longer and brought suffering to a larger number of people. It is exceedingly ironic that Islam has been presented to American blacks as the egalitarian alternative to the “white man’s slave religion” of Christianity, since Islamic slavery operated on a larger scale than did the Western slave trade, and lasted longer. While historians estimate that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved around 10.5 million people, the Islamic slave trade in the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean areas began in the seventh century and lasted into the nineteenth, and involved 17 million people.

Also, the pressure to end it moved from Christendom into Islam, not the other way around. There was no Muslim Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. In fact, when the British government in the nineteenth century adopted the view of Wilberforce and the other abolitionists as its own and thereupon began to put pressure on pro-slavery regimes, the Sultan of Morocco was incredulous precisely because of the audacity of the innovation that the British were proposing: “The traffic in slaves,” he noted, “is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam . . . up to this day.” He said that he was “not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect” and that the very idea that anyone would question its morality was absurd: “no one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.”

However, it was not the unanimity of human practice, but the plain words of the Qur’an and Muhammad that were decisive in stifling abolitionist movements within the Islamic world. Slavery was abolished under Western pressure; the Arab Muslim slave trade in Africa was ended by the force of British arms in the nineteenth century.

There is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well—notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.

Some of the evidence that Islamic slavery still goes on consists of a spate of slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan Al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to 27 years to life in prison, for keeping a woman as a slave in his home in Colorado. For his part, Al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias. He told the judge: “Your honor, I am not here to apologize, for I cannot apologize for things I did not do and for crimes I did not commit. The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution.” The following month, an Egyptian couple living in Southern California received a fine and prison terms, to be followed by deportation, after pleading guilty to holding a ten-year-old girl as a slave. And in January 2007, an attaché of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington and his wife were charged with keeping three Christian domestic workers from India in slave-like conditions in al-Saleh’s Virginia home. One of the women remarked: “I believed that I had no choice but to continue working for them even though they beat me and treated me worse than a slave.”

Slavery is still practiced openly today in two Muslim countries, Sudan and Mauritania. In line with historical practice, Muslim slavers in the Sudan primarily enslave non-Muslims, and chiefly Christians. According to the Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan (CASMAS), a human rights and abolitionist movement founded in 1995, “The current Khartoum government wants to bring the non-Muslim Black South in line with Sharia law, laid down and interpreted by conservative Muslim clergy. The Black animist and Christian South remembers many years of slave raids by Arabs from the north and east and resists Muslim religious rule and the perceived economic, cultural, and religious expansion behind it.”

One modern-day Sudanese Christian slave, James Pareng Alier, was kidnapped and enslaved when he was twelve years old. Religion was a major element of his ordeal: “I was forced to learn the Koran and re-baptised Ahmed. They told me that Christianity was a bad religion. After a time we were given military training and they told us we would be sent to fight.” Alier has no idea of his family’s whereabouts. The BBC reported in March 2007 that slave raids “were a common feature of Sudan’s 21-year north-south war, which ended in 2005. . . . According to a study by the Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute, some 11,000 young boys and girls were seized and taken across the internal border—many to the states of South Darfur and West Kordofan. . . . Most were forcibly converted to Islam, given Muslim names and told not to speak their mother tongue.” Yet even today, while non-Muslims were enslaved and often forcibly converted to Islam, their conversion does not lead to their freedom. Mauritanian anti-slavery campaigner Boubacar Messaoud explains that “it’s like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves.”

Anti-slavery crusaders like Messaoud have great difficulty working against this attitude, because it is rooted in the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example. Particularly when the slaves are non-Muslims, there is no verse of the Qur’an corresponding to Lincoln’s favored Bible verse, Genesis 3:19, that anti-slavery Muslims can invoke against those who continue to approve of and even to practice slavery.

Most Westerners have not troubled to learn this history, and no one is telling them about it. If they did, the entire slavery guiltmongering industry would collapse. And we can’t let that happen, now, can we?

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.

References
• Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t.
• “Slave Trade Shameful, Blair Says,” BBC News, March 25, 2007.
• Mark Steyn, “The Man Who ‘Murdered’ Slavery: Two Centuries Ago, a British Backbencher Changed an Entire Way of Seeing the World,” McLeans, March 19, 2007.
• John B. O’Connor, “St. Isidore of Seville,” The Catholic Encyclopedia.
• Richard Furman, Rev. Dr. Richard Furman’s Exposition of The Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population in the United States in a Communication to the Governor of South-Carolina.
• William Lloyd Garrison, speech at Charleston, South Carolina, April 14, 1865.
• Abraham Lincoln, “Reply to Delegation of Baptists on May 30, 1864,” in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, editor, Vol. VII, Rutgers University Press, 1953.
• Abraham Lincoln, “Story Written for Noah Brooks,” December 6, 1864, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, editor, Vol. VIII, Rutgers University Press, 1953.
• Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address.
• Social Justice in Islam.
• Bukhari Hadith, vol. 1, book 2, no. 13.
• The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude.
• The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century.
• Muslim Slave System in Medieval India.
• God’s Rule: Government and Islam.
• White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves.
• The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic War and the Fate of Non-Muslims.
Race and Slavery in the Middle East
• Hilary Andersson, “Born to Be a Slave in Niger,” BBC News, February 11, 2005.
• Barbara Ferguson, “Saudi Gets 27 Years to Life for Enslaving Maid,” Arab News, September 1, 2006.
• “Egyptians Who Enslaved girl, 10, Get U.S. Prison,” Reuters, October 24, 2006.
• “Kuwaiti Diplomat Accused of Domestic Slavery,” ABC7 News, January 17, 2007.
• Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan, “Sudan Q & A.”
• Aid to the Church in Need, “Religious Freedom in the Majority Islamic Countries 1998 Report: Sudan.”
• Joseph Winter, “No Return for Sudan’s Forgotten Slaves,” BBC News, March 16, 2007.
• Pascal Fletcher, “Slavery Still Exists in Mauritania,” Reuters, March 21, 2007.